March 22, 2009

Winning At The Innovation Casino

My friend, Dave, likes to play poker. He really enjoys playing in poker tournaments. Of course the fact that he regularly wins may help. To him, poker is not a game of chance. He has studied and learned the disciplines and techniques. He practices his game, and he plays to win. In Dave’s mind, poker is not a losing game; it is not a negative expectation game like black jack. No, poker is about winning.

So, why do I bring the tale of Dave and his winning ways at poker? I have been on Twitter for almost two months now where I follow tweets on innovation. Over the past few weeks, I have noticed that every few days there is a big flurry of tweets proclaiming that innovation is all about failure. Some tweets even state that in order to succeed at innovation, you need to fail more.

To put it delicately, such talk about innovation is pure twaddle. Yes, I know there are many of you who will violently disagree, but let me explain why it is fundamentally import to the health of your innovation programs that you not embrace the mind numbing mantra innovation of hallowing failure.

If innovation isn’t about failure, what is it about? Of course, if you read this blog regularly, you already know the answer. Innovation is about winning! That doesn’t mean that every innovation initiative will succeed. Some will fail. However, the goal is to win. To create new and unique value that you can deliver to customers and thereby build value for your enterprise. Admit it; nobody says, “Hey, let’s toss forty million down the toilet on this dopey idea!” No, people embark on the journey of innovation because they believe that their concept provides a map to success.

That is why the very language of failure defeats innovation before it gets started. C-level executives responsible for company performance don’t want to hear about failure. Failure means lost investment and that translates to a drag on corporate value. If you convince your CEO to embrace failure to succeed at innovation, he is still expecting to win at the innovation game. If he doesn’t see that you know how to win, his support will be very short lived.

Employees won’t want to hear they are being assigned to an innovation team if they believe that team will fail. As much as you tell them otherwise they feel the taint of failure will stick to them and hurt their future. Even the most ardent innovation workers can find their resolve tested if they never taste the fruits of success.

As you can see, this is not merely an argument of semantics. The language of failure can very quickly turn into a self-fulfilling prophesy as your innovation programs have their funding withdrawn or see key employees desert the mission in favor of jobs where they can find success.

So what about examples like Edison? Didn’t he fail 10,000 times? Not if you ask Edison.

Iteration is a valuable tool for empirical science and innovation. Exploration is just that. The process of finding success may require validation of various hypotheses and alternatives. If you are truly in uncharted waters trying to deliver on a very bleeding edge concept, you won’t stick it out if you personally feel that every pothole on the way is a failure. You must believe you can succeed and that each iteration is a valuable data point or you won’t make it to the finish line.

Some people run to the refuge of the myth of failure because they are still slogging through the mire of accidental innovation models. For these people, innovation means waiting until you stumble upon a winning idea. Lacking the skills to discriminate, they try and run with any idea that strikes a chord. It’s no wonder that so many of these initiatives are doomed before they get off the ground. But, there is a better way. The first step to rising out or the swamp of accidental innovation is recognizing you are there and not accepting a poor success ratio as simply being the ante to play the game.

The disciplines of repeatable, successful innovation can be learned. Structured innovation may sound like an oxymoron, but it’s a very powerful concept. In the hands of skilled practitioners, sustainable innovation practices are the difference between mucking about in the wasteland of accidental innovation transforming your enterprise to a high performance innovation organization.

The innovation game is also one that can be bent to your will. Innovation skills in how to look at markets and opportunity spaces, how to predict disruptive opportunity cycles, how to find the optimal execution plan to move from idea to product can all be learned and integrated into you product development programs.

Language is a powerful medium. It provides us with the pallet we use to express our most important thoughts, giving them shape, form, and meaning. Each time we use language we create mental images for our listeners—some intended, some not. It is important to understand the destructive impact the language of failure has on innovation.

Master the skills to play at the innovation table, and you will not be worrying about how to defend your failures. You will be enjoying the benefits of innovation as a value driving core competence. You will pass your competitors as they drop their resources into the one armed bandit of accidental innovation reliance because you are innovating to win.

Comments

Great article, Jim. As you and I have exchanged over the years (as recently last week as I watched you shake your head and chuckle quietly as I lectured a room on the essential need for failure in an innovation practice), we perhaps share different views on what failure means.

Or do we?

My own view (which I've written about before) is that failure is not only an option, it's essential. The journey of 10,000 miles begins with a single step. For many, it requires the other several million steps. For a very select few, their first step is onto the teleporter. Most management that I speak with are expecting their teams to journey 10,000 miles in one step, which is a very unrealistic expectation.

Your invocation of the brightest bulb in the innovation bunch made me go back and re-read "Innovate Like Edison", by Michael J. Gelb. Specifically, I wanted to review how Edison treated failure.

According to Gelb, Edison developed five skills for successful invention:

1) Have a solution-centered mindset.
2) Use kaleidoscopic thinking.
3) Use full-spectrum engagement.
4) Become a master at collaboration.
5) Create "Super Value".

Despite mastery of these skills, Edison and his teams at Menlo Park recorded far more failures than successes in pursuing their technical and product goals. Were their failures actually failures? Edison had this to say on the nature of failure:

"I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward."

"Many of life's failures are men who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."

and one of my favorites...

"Show me a thoroughly satisfied man, and I will show you a failure."

I think what is so inspiring about Edison and others like him that we get a chance to work with every day, is that the ultimate success in any inventive effort, is the learning which results. Regardless of whether the outcome is right or wrong, the highest success-metric for innovators is that something was learned which can be applied in practice to the next attempt.

If the on the last step of a 10,000 mile journey, the inventor discovers the teleporter, that makes the discovery no less important than if it was discovered on the first step. The essential "failures" of all the in-between steps, were still essential.

The real winner, of course, will be the innovation practitioner of methodologies that minimizes the mean distance of the success path.

So perhaps, semantics is a small part of the problem, but more so, it is the owner of the success metric. As innovation practitioners, we ultimately own our metrics for success and failure, regardless of what may be imposed on us by management or markets. In my own case, a failure to achieve a specific goal of an innovation task is a step to ultimate success. Failing frequently and learning (and with a methodology for improving how I apply what I learn) means succeeding more frequently and with higher impact.

Obviously I haven't succeeded in convincing you on the critical need to embrace failure for winning innovation.

Jims: First--great analogy since any entrepreneur worth her salt must have just a bit of the riverboat gambler in her personality! I think you are both right and that each technique brings something of value to the table. For me, innovation is examining the problem from all sides and, taking an artist's view, looking hard at the "negative space"--what is missing, what are the other options for filling that space? I know there is never just one answer--to mix metaphors, there are multiple jig-saw pieces that could be plugged into the space and each must be evaluated carefully to measure their potential for success. Persistence is another key tool--you have to look at ALL the pieces to see which might have the best chance to complete the picture. You might have to get out the jig saw again and "operate" on one of the pieces to find the most dynamic solution--but it's there. Each of those steps where you "tweak" results could be considered a failure, but inherent in the approach is the knowledge that somewhere out there there IS a better solution and you will find it. Rosemary Carstens @twitter2go

I guess you are referring to the "fail early, fail often, fail fast" mantra, often attributed to Silicon Valley thinking. Or also the "You learn a lot by failing 10 times" type advice. As I wrote in a recent conversation with @j4ngis and others on twitter: "We should learn the right lessons" from our failures, but also "History shows that we are poor at learning from our errors". And the latter is not good for Innovation should we apply the above principles.

It seems strange indeed, in times where everyone seems to agree that Innovation is key to surviving the recession, that the focus is on failure. Innovation is not trial and error. Innovation is a subtle mix of creativity, discipline, hard work, perseverance, and stubbornness (or at least, a capability to ignore the "good" advise from others).

Maybe discipline, hard work, and perseverance are my European perspective on innovation, although I think Edison would agree with me here. And many others, scientists or dilettante innovators alike.

- Discipline because for innovation to succeed, or at least to go beyond the "lucky draws", a formal process is required. This process includes learning the lessons referred to above, but also ensures convergent actions, documenting objectives, intermediate results, etc. Without such process, innovation is an "accident de parcours". Thanks to the innovation management process, it becomes a planned outcome. KM is key to the innovation process.

- Hard work because even though the best ideas may come under the shower or other strange circumstances, turning those concepts into tangible products or services requires a lot of development work, finetuning, testing, market validation, packaging, pricing, etc. Failure in any of these steps, may mean failure to get an idea to the market.

- Perseverance because there where things can go wrong, most probably they will. And also because turning a broad concept into a narrow product definition will require much iteration, prototyping, etc. (and I think that we fully agree here on the semantics, iterative development is about convergence, not about failure).

Because of the above, structured innovation certainly is not an oxymoron (to me). Innovation management is a mature way to get there. But innovation management does not guarantee results either. The same way sound project management doesn't guarantee delivery. That's because there are many factors at play, both inside and outside the organization (think shareholders, competitive environment, market pressure, access to funding, etc.). However, by applying innovation management processes, an organization will significantly increase its chances of success...

Jim, I am sure we will debate the semantics many times in the future. However, I find it amusing that you choose to invoke Edison here. He was quite resolute in his refusal to call his thousands of experiments failures. He understood the role of iteration & experimentation in innovation.

Rosemary, I really like your reference to negative space. This is a very useful thinking tool. I also agree that persistence is a vital personal attribute for any great innovator. Innovation is a journey, and the road to success is rarely a smooth one. Only those with a resolute spirit will have the endurance to complete the journey.

Christian, It is no surprise to me that you have very succinctly zeroed in on the crux of the matter. Innovation is not something that need be left to chance. There are reliable, repeatable methods of innovation practice that remove much of the risk and tilt the odds of success in your favor. This is of course why I used the casino metaphor.

If you can changes the rules of the game so that you can reliably win, you are a fool to not do so. Innovation is just such a game. If you are going to venture into innovation, you should be innovating to win!